US wins extradition of Richard O'Dwyer

A 23-year old student from
Sheffield Hallam University in the north of England is bound for
America. That wouldn't be unusual-except that Richard O'Dwyer won't
go voluntarily. The Home Secretary has today agreed to extradite O'Dwyer over US copyright infringement
charges for running a "linking site" called TVShack.

Back in June 2010, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
seized O'Dwyer's tvshack.net domain name after a closed, one-sided
hearing before a judge. (All domains ending in .net and .com are
seizable by US law enforcement, regardless of where their owners
are located.) But O'Dwyer soon had the site back up at a new
address, TVShack.cc, which did not require a US-based domain name
registrar. He slapped a notice to the top of the new site urging
users to update their bookmarks.

In November 2010, British police showed up at O'Dwyer's home. As
Julia O'Dwyer, Richard's mother, told us last year, "They had two
American guys with them, which Richard assumes were men from ICE.
They questioned him about his website. It wasn't more than an hour.
The ICE men shook his hand when they left," she said. "One of them
said 'Don't worry, you won't have to go to America.'"

Richard, apparently realising that his site had become a serious
matter, took it down. A couple of computers were seized, and he
hoped that would be the end of the matter.

It wasn't. He was asked to report to his local police station on
23 May, 2011, where he found out what had happened: UK police had
dropped their own investigation, but the US had requested O'Dwyer's
extradition.

Such remedies are uncommon among all offenses; they are doubly
so when it comes to copyright and computer cases. Such extraditions
were nearly unheard of until the last year, when O'Dwyer and then
Megaupload's Kim Dotcom both became extradition targets over
copyright cases.

O'Dwyer's site was a "linking site" that did not host infringing
content itself, and his lawyer compared it to Google, which also
links to copyrighted content. TVshack did do things like show lists
of the most clicked-on links (surprise: most were copyrighted TV
shows), however, and the proportion of offending links appears to
be much higher than at a search engine like Google. US lawyers
argued that O'Dwyer had personally promoted links to infringing
content, too.

O'Dwyer's site did not appear to violate UK law, and O'Dwyer's
servers weren't located in the US. This alone poses no problem to
an extradition claim; courts have recognised for centuries that a
person can't simply sit in another jurisdiction and direct a harm
into another jurisdiction without penalty. But the general question
raised in such cases is whether the alleged miscreant had a "nexus"
with the target jurisdiction; had he put himself under its rule by
choosing to transact business there? Or was the contact merely
incidental and accidental?

A UK judge recently found a nexus. "There are said to be direct consequences of
criminal activity by Richard O'Dwyer in the USA albeit by him never
leaving the north of England. Such a state of affairs does not
demand a trial here if the competent UK authorities decline to act
and does, in my judgment, permit one in the USA," he ruled two
months ago. (Julia O'Dwyer said that the judge lacked the
"technical brains to know about the whole thing. That guy just
lives and breathes extradition.")

Comments

Pretty obscene. Richard has done something that is not even illegal in this country and yet can be whisked off to another country for trial without his accusers having to produce one shred of evidence that there is a case to answer. Pathetic British justice and utterly shameful. Isn't it the government's job to look after the rights of British citizens? Could have fooled me. It is time this wholly unjust and unfair extradition treaty was repealed. Until it is any British internet user is at the mercy of some faceless bureaucrat in the US who takes it into his head to decide that they have infringed some obscure US law. They don't need evidence - they can just grab you whenever they want and the spineless British justice system will not protect you one little bit.

Tom Hill

Mar 15th 2012

I can forsee all these trackers to start black listing US address ranges, It seems the only course of action.

Al

Mar 15th 2012

With President Obama in office, an American Citizen, without trial, under just suspect of being a terrorist, was assassinated in America. What's to stop the U.S. Power Monger and almost Dictator, Obama, from going into other countries when he treats his own citizens even worse? I had hoped any other country could and would have said 'no' to him.... I apologize on behalf of the U.S.A. that still cares about freedoms and liberty, which is surprisingly little...

-Ashamed U.S. Citizen.

Dan W

Mar 15th 2012

So this is that much celebrated "Special relationship" between the UK and USA worth.

jph

Mar 15th 2012

The first thing people need to know when starting a website is that a .com or .net is not the way to go.From the start you should use alternative domain ends.

Early Grayce

Mar 16th 2012

Do you think he would have been sent to Iran if he broke the Iranian law?

Henrik

Mar 16th 2012

What in earth!! What*s wrong with UK nowadays!! This is obscene!!

Usee Fish

Mar 17th 2012

The evidential disparity argument is a red herring. The real problem with Blair's Extradition Act 2003 is that it removed 2 of the key protections UK citizens have traditionally had againstvested interest rogue extraditions like this one. First the principal of dual criminality and second, the principal of apprpriate forum. The Act MUST BE totally repealed!

Fred Hause

Mar 17th 2012

Citizens of the UK should only have to worry about the laws of their land - there's enough of them already. The extradition agreement was accepted on the basis of fighting terrorism - using it for other purposes (especially to mitigate the law and justice systems of a nation for the benefit of multinational corporations) is a blatant abuse of public trust.

Theresa May is a piece of shit, she deserves no mercy, no peace and no remorse.